New Years, More Goals, Results Always Mixed

NYE 2010.. in which I promised to play every game I own.. yeah right, because Steam sales.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of New Year’s resolutions, but the past few years I’ve found myself liking to make goals around this time. I suppose that is nearly the same thing. Sometimes I fail at them; sometimes my priorities change during the year; sometimes I make some progress.

It is hard for me to not over-promise. When I feel hopeful I feel like the things I can do are endless. So it takes some will power to limit this list to reasonability, but here it is:

– Work out consistently – I’ve actually already done fairly well with this since about May, although October I did badly, and December I did badly. I’m shooting for four times a week. If I could get myself to start getting up and going in the morning, that would be nice too.

– Along the same lines: Start doing yoga again. No specific goal, just do it. I might look into the possibility of occasionally going on lunch; I might buy a Groupon for Yoga Tree, which is the place on 14th Street, so conveniently located to home. They have about two evening classes per week that I could make. If I could find a place close to work.. with a noon class.. that allows drop-ins rather than a membership.. then I might be able to do that once a week or so. I just felt a lot better, both physically and emotionally when I was doing yoga. And some days I’d so much rather do that than go to the gym. (I stopped because of the price of membership and how hard it was for me to make it to class when I got off at 7.)

– Get some of the chronically messy parts of the house to a comfortable state. I’m not super sensitive to minor clutter.. but I’d like to have all the rooms at least to the point that it feels comfortable to be in them. Some of them also need some design issues fixed. Like the loft living room/tv room.. I don’t think I can abide those curtains much longer.

– Blog more consistently. I’m still trying to decide what a reasonable goal is for this – three posts per week? I’d like to say a post everyday, but its not reasonable, and I know if I tried to make myself do that, then I’d wind up doing cop-out posts all the time. But, to the end of getting myself to write more regularly, there are a couple of things I’m going to do: (1) Make a jar full of blog topic ideas so I can just randomly draw from the jar. This way I don’t spend a lot of my writing time deciding what to write, and ideas don’t get “lost”. (2) Maybe find something I can do once per week that is a very “easy” post – like a photo blog of some sort, or a free form update? Something that doesn’t take a ton of time or put a lot of pressure on me to write long and perfectly, and also not something that requires the organization of tons of photos amongst text.

– Find a sustainable way to do YouTube that is enjoyable for me. I’m not sure exactly what this means. I know it means doing videos regularly, and doing the videos I’m most excited about doing, without forcing myself to do videos because I feel I “should” have a video of X type. I know that in order to be successful in the amount of free time that I really have, I have to keep editing minimal. And I know I enjoy it most when I am doing video of what is already going on at the time – guerrilla journalism style.

– Explore the possibility of saving time and eating better by planning out meals. Maybe I won’t hit planning the whole week. Maybe just a few days at a time. The point is though, to make myself consume enough good food that I don’t feel hungry enough to eat crappy food.

– Spend time and resources on the things that really matter to me. This is always the goal, but sometimes I get down a rabbit hole on a tangent. Sometimes this goal is more visceral than other times. Sometimes to get closer to the goal, you need to give an investment to something or someone. And sometimes you need to take resources away from someone or something.

– And finally.. sometimes, when at the core I know I want to… let myself just play video games for awhile, without feeling bad about it or continuing to think about something more productive I should be doing. Like the time I played FFXIV instead of writing this blog. Focusing on another world, free of obligations, in small doses, helps me get the “calm” in my head, much like yoga.